H.G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley (an outer London borough) and was educated at the Normal School of Science in London.
He worked as a draper's apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist until 1895, when
he became a full-time writer. In the next 50 years he produced more than 80 books including
The Invisible Man (1897), When the Sleeper Awakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901)
and The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
After World War I, he wrote an immensely popular historical work, The Outline of History (2 volumes, 1920).
He died August 13, 1946, in London.

In 1888, the Science Schools Journal, the magazine of the Normal School of Science, published an incomplete
serial by the journal's founder and former editor, H.G. Wells. The serial was called 'The Chronic Argonauts' and over
the next several years Wells would return to the idea obsessively. In 1894, for instance, he used it as the basis
for a series of science articles in The National Observer. The editor of The National Observer then
founded a new magazine, The New Review, and commissioned Wells to turn his science articles into a
serial story, and the serial in turn became Wells's first novel, The Time Machine, the first of four books
to come out by Wells in 1895 (the others being a book of humorous essays, a collection of short stories and a
fantasy novel).

The history of this short novel is instructive. It shows Wells developing and exploring the idea consistently over
several years, as his rate of production (at least one book a year and more often two or three for every remaining
year of his life) would preclude him from ever doing again. In many ways, The Time Machine is his most complete
work, a thorough development of the Darwinian ideas he had absorbed at the Normal School of Science and that would
form the bedrock of everything else he did throughout his career. It is also a most unusual book, because in no other
novel would he reach as far into the future, in no other novel would he imagine so comprehensively the death of
everything, and in no other novel would he confront directly what we now term the post-human. Though it was the
novel he wrote first, it is the full stop that comes at the end of everything else he wrote later.

Curiously, given much of what he would write in the twentieth century (and given the other book under review here),
it is the one work where Darwinian thought is applied to the utopian ideal, and it is the utopian ideal that is
found wanting. The Time Traveller's first thought, on encountering the devolved society of the Eloi, is that utopia
has failed: "Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is
strength, would become weakness" (34). The Time Traveller almost immediately rejects this theory, but towards the
end of his stay in the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, he returns to something very like that first
notion: "No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left
unsolved. And a great quiet had followed" (64).

The great quiet of utopia is anti-evolutionary, because evolution can only proceed where there is contest. Where
there is no contest, evolution does not stop, it goes into reverse, and as inertia slows the world until it stops
at that terminal beach that is probably the most haunting image in the entire novel, so devolution slows human
progress until it stops in the fateful ruin that is the world of the Eloi and Morlocks.

Justin E.A. Busch begins his extended essay with The Time Machine, though he rarely touches the work again,
perhaps because its austere scientific view that extends beyond human society is antithetical to everything else
he tries to argue in this book. From The Time Machine, Busch takes the idea that Utopia cannot be an end
in itself, it can only be a process. We must struggle towards Utopia, secure in the knowledge that we can never
reach it, because to reach Utopia is a kind of death. I agree with this starting point; it is almost the last
thing in the book that I agree with.

Busch's position is that everything Wells wrote (and he quotes extensively from utopian novels, mainstream novels
and non-fiction) contributes to one coherent utopian vision, though he assumes such a position rather than arguing
for it. Having foreseen the end of humanity, and with it the end of the world, in The Time Machine, Wells
devoted the rest of his career towards advocating a route towards Utopia. I find this a difficult enough position
to accept, since I find it hard to see, for instance, Men Like Gods, A Modern Utopia, The Shape
of Things to Come and his advocacy for the United Nations as being all part and parcel of the same
conception. But Busch takes it a step further: for him, Wells is unquestionably right in everything he
propounds. Any criticism of Wells is dismissed as superficial or a travesty. The only moment in the entire book
when Busch comes close to saying that Wells is wrong about anything comes in a footnote, when he describes
the militaristic origin of the Samurai in A Modern Utopia as "a lapse of imagination on his
part" (184, n27), a fairly gentle rebuke but even so hidden away as if he dare not risk suggesting even the
slightest flaw in his hero's vision within the body of his book.

The key to Busch's argument is that fiction is the only way to convince people generally to follow a utopian
path. Philosophy, through its inherent appeal to reason, might change the minds of some people through argument,
but the emotional appeal of fiction is needed to make the majority see the possibilities of the utopian
path. This is a strange argument on many levels. To start with, the only utopias with which Busch compares
Wells's work are Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia (the latter dealt with rather
grudgingly), both of which were, of course, written as works of philosophy; so it looks as if he's loading
the scales in Wells's favour even before he starts his discussion (though it is arguable that the political
effect of More's Utopia over the centuries has been far in excess of anything Wells achieved, since it
fed into real-world projects as varied as the utopian communes during the English Civil Wars and the political
philosophy of Karl Marx). What he noticeably does not do, however, is make any reference whatsoever to earlier
and contemporary fictional utopias with which Wells might well be expected to be familiar, works such
as News from Nowhere by William Morris, Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, Herland
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, We by Yevgeny Zamiatin (this latter, for instance, was available in an
English translation well before Wells wrote such works as The Open Conspiracy, which might have
benefitted from Zamiatin's dystopian version of an entirely open society). If fiction is the strongest
instrument in the propounding of utopian ideas, why are none of these fictions taken into consideration? Come
to that, if fiction is what gives Wells the edge over Plato and More, why does Busch give equal space and weight
to so much of Wells's non-fiction, such as The Open Conspiracy or What is Coming?

One other thing that made me uneasy about Busch's explication of Wellsian utopias is that I wasn't always certain
that we were getting at what Wells actually believed, rather we get, as Busch puts it: "the sort of view Wells
presumably (and, I would argue, given the nature of his project, necessarily) holds" (131). Given that the project,
as he puts it, often seems to originate more with Busch than with Wells, that necessity could be questionable to
say the least. At one point, for instance, he declares, without supporting argument, that Wells's views on freedom
are essentially existentialist, then quotes Sartre and de Beauvoir to fill in perceived gaps in his thinking. The
problem is an historical one: Wells was already dead when the philosophy of existentialism first became widely
known in the UK, so he is unlikely to have been an existentialist as such. And however much his views at one or
other stage of his long and prolific career might have appeared to coincide with those of existentialism, it is
hard to imagine, say, the Wells who was a friend of James and Conrad also being any sort of existentialist;
while the Wells of the 1940s is unlikely to have had sympathy with the contemporary attitudes of Sartre across
the Channel in Occupied France. In other words, the sweeping equivalence of Wells and existentialism is, on
the surface at least, unconvincing, and so this assertion needs far more supporting argument than Busch provides.

What we do get is an account of a utopian process that is illustrated variously from Wells's works, but without
anything other than the author's assertion to suggest that they were ever intended to be brought together in
this way. For instance, Wells undoubtedly presented a World State in a number of works, and in general regarded
it as a good thing (hence his active support for the idea of the United Nations). But the World State we
glimpse in The Sleeper Awakes does not seem to be the same as the one in A Modern Utopia or
indeed the one that grows out of war and disaster in The Shape of Things to Come. The different World
States appear to be nearer or farther away in our futures depending on the story he has to tell, they come
about by different means and are governed in different ways. The samurai whose wise counsel directs A
Modern Utopia (and who come closest in all Wells's work to the philosopher-kings who rule Plato's
Republic) are clearly not the same as the toga-clad rulers in The Shape of Things to Come. And
though Wells obviously expects human misery to decrease, crime and violence to fall away and wisdom to increase
as we move towards this World State, he is never entirely clear about the ways that this might come about. What
is more, the terminal vision of The Time Machine tells us that for Wells the World State could never be
an end in itself, though the nearest he ever comes to looking beyond this staging post on the unending journey
to Utopia is the rocket ship at the end of The Shape of Things to Come (an ending that might also
suggest some familiarity with Zamiatin's We).

Busch begins his case by looking at the individual, the people who will make up Utopia and those who will need
to be convinced of the case to start moving towards that process. Though here he seems to rely primarily on
the four-fold division of humanity that is presented in A Modern Utopia but which is never actually
replicated anywhere else. Throughout this chapter, indeed throughout the entire book, it is curious that
Wells's actual political views never get a look it: the word 'fabian' is absent entirely, 'socialist' tends
to be used only in quotations from someone else. Marxism is never mentioned without a metaphorical spit, and
Wells's ideas are described as "squarely in the tradition of classical liberalism" (72). This doesn't
actually pervert Wellsian politics, but it does muddy the waters, and it adds to the impression that what
we are getting here is the Wellsian utopianism that Busch wants to find, unsullied by nasty stuff like politics.

From the individual, Busch takes us into a chapter entitled "The Role of the Novel," though this turns out
to be mostly devoted to discussing the role of education. It is also where we really start to see the
partiality of Busch's perspective. He raises several objections to Wells's views from a variety of
commentators, but generally phrased in such a way that they can be dismissed off-handedly, generally in
fewer words than it takes to voice the objection. And if the objection cannot be simply dismissed, it is
made to seem irrelevant. The serious charge of anti-semitism that has been laid against Wells is one that
I am not sure does stand up to thorough scrutiny, but it cannot be swept aside as airily as Busch deals
with it, and when he adds: "remove every single testily phrased comment about Judaism from his work, and
the utopian project will remain unchanged" (70) you start to wonder why he thought to raise the issue in
the first place. If you are not going to treat it seriously, why put it in there? But then, the fact that
he reduces criticisms of Wells to their weakest possible expression tends to make his defence of Wells seem
equally weak. He is particularly poor in defending Wells against charges of scientific dictatorship. But
then, in the next chapter on the World State, Busch engages at length with the conservative views of F.A.
Hayek, and because he is prepared to argue in detail the result is the best and most convincing engagement
with Wells's views in the entire book. It is a real pity that this level of discussion could not have been
sustained throughout the book because it would have been immeasureably stronger as a result. But in fact
it is barely sustained for a chapter, and when he moves in the next chapter to discuss issues of freedom
in the World State and in the final chapter to discuss death, the arguments pro and con seem less
convincing than ever. Because he believes that Wells is unquestionably right in everything pertaining
to utopia, he appears to consider that any critic must be so obviously wrong that no spirited or detailed
defence is actually required.

But enough of Busch's contentious volume, let us turn once again to The Time Machine, probably one
of the half-dozen or so most important works in the entire history of science fiction, and a book that is
a joy to read again and again. This new edition is intended for schools; it is annotated (though not as
extensively as I would have liked) and each page has a wide margin for the student to make their own
notes. What's more it comes with two critical essays. 'The Time Machine: A Melancholy Satire' by series
editor Paul Cook does more to set the political context of Wells's work in four pages than Busch can
manage in 170. But accompanying this is a slightly revised extract from The World Beyond the Hill,
the tendentious history of science fiction by Alexei and Cory Panshin. As a straightforward factual
account of Wells's early life and career, this is fair enough, but their perversely mystical belief
that science fiction is a form of transcendental myth making comes through all the time, and could not
fail to give any student new to science fiction a very peculiar and far from accurate impression of the genre.

Paul Kincaid is the recipient of the SFRA's Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service for 2006.
His collection of essays and reviews, What it is we do when we read science fiction is published by Beccon Publications.